Authors: Matthew de CarteretTags: shellcodeEvent: Ruxcon 2010Abstract: Shellcode is the crux of any exploit being run today. It dictates what the exploit aims to gain from its use — without shellcode the exploit does nothing. Understanding what shellcode does can be a major step in the incident handling process. Shellcode can do anything you can imagine code could do. Not every shellcode used in an exploit downloads malware or spawns a shell. Times have changed and the targets have updated their protection. Shellcode today could be a straight forward API call to download a file and execute it or it could be code to just disable/create a firewall rule on your windows server. Catching an exploit is a great step in understanding the purpose of an attack. Extracting and reviewing the shellcode will allow you to streamline your incident handlers to collect malware and focus their reviews on particular services or applications. This talk will demonstrate methods on captured exploits for extracting shellcode and understanding its purpose.